Beethoven, Ludwig van

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      The 25 Best Classical Music Tracks of 2020

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyThe 25 Best Classical Music Tracks of 2020Listen to our critics’ favorites from a year in which much of the energy in music came from recordings.Credit…The New York TimesAnthony Tommasini, Zachary Woolfe, Joshua Barone, Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim, David Allen and Dec. 17, 2020Thomas Adès: Berceuse from ‘The Exterminating Angel’“In Seven Days”; Kirill Gerstein, piano (Myrios)The composer Thomas Adès and the pianist Kirill Gerstein’s artistically fruitful friendship has given us two essential albums this year: the premiere recording of Mr. Adès’s Concerto for Piano and Orchestra, featuring Mr. Gerstein and the Boston Symphony Orchestra (Deutsche Grammophon); and this one, which includes a solo arrangement of the harrowing and slippery Berceuse from Mr. Adès’s opera “The Exterminating Angel.” JOSHUA BARONEBerceuse from “The Exterminating Angel”Myrios◆ ◆ ◆Bach: Cello Suite No. 4, GigueBach: Complete Cello Suites (Transcribed for Violin); Johnny Gandelsman, violin (In a Circle)From the beginning of this movement, ornamented with the insouciance of folk music, it’s difficult to resist tapping along with your foot. That urge doesn’t really leave throughout the rest of the six cello suites, lithely rendered here on solo violin by Johnny Gandelsman. This is Bach in zero gravity: feather-light and freely dancing. JOSHUA BARONESuite No. 4, GigueIn a Circle◆ ◆ ◆Beethoven: Symphony No. 2, Allegro moltoBeethoven: Symphonies and Overtures; Vienna State Opera Orchestra and others; Hermann Scherchen, conductor (Deutsche Grammophon)The few new Beethoven symphonies released in this, his 250th birthday year, have largely offered more evidence for the drab state of interpretive tastes today. Not so the rereleases — above all this remastered and exceptionally bracing cycle that was eons ahead of its time when it first came out in the 1950s. Scherchen’s Beethoven — like this Second Symphony with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra — is fast, sleek and astonishing detailed, as exciting as anything set down since. DAVID ALLENSymphony No. 2, Allegro moltoDeutsche Grammophon◆ ◆ ◆Nadia Boulanger: ‘Soir d’hiver’“Clairières: Songs by Lili and Nadia Boulanger”; Nicholas Phan, tenor; Myra Huang, piano (Avie)After Lili Boulanger, the gifted French composer, died in 1918 at just 24, her devoted older sister Nadia suffered doubts about her own composing and turned to teaching. On this lovely recording, the tenor Nicholas Phan performs elegant songs by both sisters, ending with Nadia’s misty, rapturous “Soir d’hiver,” a 1915 setting of her poem about a young mother abandoned by her lover. ANTHONY TOMMASINI“Soir d’hiver”Avie◆ ◆ ◆Chopin: Piano Concerto No. 1, RomanceChopin: Piano Concertos; Benjamin Grosvenor, piano; Royal Scottish National Orchestra; Elim Chan, conductor (Decca)There’s pianism of historic caliber on this release, and another mark of Mr. Grosvenor’s breathtaking maturity, even though he is still in his 20s. Summoning playing of pure poetry, he lavishes on these concertos all his lauded sensitivity, innate sense of pace and effortless way with phrasing. He’s matched bar for bar by Ms. Chan, an impressive young conductor who makes an occasion of orchestral writing that in other hands sounds routine. DAVID ALLENPiano Concerto No. 1, RomanceDecca◆ ◆ ◆Duke Ellington: ‘Light’“Black, Brown and Beige”; Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra with Wynton Marsalis (Blue Engine)If Ellington’s 1943 Carnegie Hall performance of his “Black, Brown and Beige” remains matchless, its radio broadcast sound has dated, making the crispness of this faithful recent rendition worth savoring. Sterling interpretation and production values permit a fresh look at “Light,” including the elegant way Ellington weaves together motifs heard earlier in “Black,” just before a rousing finish. SETH COLTER WALLS“Light”Blue Engine◆ ◆ ◆Eriks Esenvalds: ‘Earth Teach Me Quiet’“Rising w/ the Crossing”; the Crossing (New Focus)Earlier this year, when singing together became just about the most dangerous thing you could do, Donald Nally, the magus behind the Crossing, our finest contemporary-music choir, began posting daily recordings from their archives. He called it “Rising w/ the Crossing,” also the title of an album of a dozen highlights. There’s David Lang’s eerily prescient reflection on the 1918 flu pandemic, performed last year, and Alex Berko’s stirring “Lincoln.” But I keep returning to Eriks Esenvalds’s dreamily unfolding appeal to the Earth, its text a prayer of the Ute people of the American Southwest: a work of true radiance, fired by the precision and passion of this spectacular group. ZACHARY WOOLFE“Earth Teach Me Quiet”New Focus◆ ◆ ◆Antoine Forqueray: ‘Jupiter’“Barricades”; Thomas Dunford, lute; Jean Rondeau, harpsichord (Erato)This is Baroque music as hard-rock jam: driving, intense, dizzying, two musicians facing off in a brash battle that raises both their levels. It is the raucous climax of an album that creates a new little repertory for lute and harpsichord duo, with arrangements of favorites and relative obscurities that highlight Thomas Dunford and Jean Rondeau’s sly, exuberant artistic chemistry. ZACHARY WOOLFE“Jupiter”Warner Classics◆ ◆ ◆Ash Fure: ‘Shiver Lung’“Something to Hunt”; International Contemporary Ensemble; Lucy Dhegrae and Alice Teyssier, vocalists (Sound American)I try not to be fussy with audio quality. But if anything calls for an exception, it’s this long-awaited collection of music by Ash Fure — works that experiment with how sounds are made and felt. So before hitting play, gather your focus, along with your best headphones or speakers, for an intensely visceral listening experience. JOSHUA BARONE“Shiver Lung”Sound American◆ ◆ ◆Handel: ‘Pensieri, voi mi tormentate’“Agrippina”; Joyce DiDonato, mezzo-soprano; Il Pomo d’Oro; Maxim Emelyanychev, conductor (Erato)A shot of venom, boring its way into the brain: There are some arias that aim to soothe anxiety, but for pure cathartic transference of all the anger, fear and impotence that 2020 has sparked, this aria — “Thoughts, you torment me” — by the title character of Handel’s “Agrippina” is the ticket. The fiercely dramatic Joyce DiDonato brings her multihued mezzo and over-the-top embellishments to the music, while the period-instrument orchestra pushes things along with raw-edged insistence. CORINNA da FONSECA-WOLLHEIM“Pensieri, voi mi tormentate”Erato◆ ◆ ◆Handel: Harpsichord Suite No. 4, AllemandeHandel: Suites for Harpsichord; Pierre Hantaï, harpsichord (Mirare)Handel’s eight suites for harpsichord, published in 1720, haven’t always gotten as much attention or respect among performers as the keyboard works of Couperin, Rameau or, especially, Bach. Sometimes they’ve been viewed more or less as training exercises: good for technique but not quite sublime. Pierre Hantaï, known for his vivid Scarlatti, dispels the slightly derogatory preconceptions with suave danciness and lucid touch. ZACHARY WOOLFEHarpsichord Suite No. 4, AllemandeMirare◆ ◆ ◆David Hertzberg: ‘Is that you, my love?’“The Wake World”; Maeve Hoglund, soprano; Samantha Hankey, mezzo-soprano; Elizabeth Braden, conductor (Tzadik)With his playfully convoluted 2017 fairy tale opera “The Wake World,” David Hertzberg demonstrated that voluptuous, sweeping elements of grand opera could be reimagined for today. In the work’s swelling, shimmering climactic duet between a young seeker and her fairy prince, Ravel meets Messiaen, and Wagner meets Scriabin; the music is spiky, original and wondrous strange. ANTHONY TOMMASINI“Is that you, my love?”Tzadik◆ ◆ ◆Nathalie Joachim: ‘Dam mwen yo’“Forward Music Project 1.0”; Amanda Gookin, cello (Bright Shiny Things)Even when brief and minimalist, Nathalie Joachim’s compositions cross complex ranges of emotion. Here, in a piece for cello (and vocals recorded by its composer), the somber cast of mood at the opening is complicated by a change in gait. The effect is akin to what you might feel inventing a new dance on the spot, while trudging through otherwise grim surroundings. SETH COLTER WALLS“Dam mwen yo”Bright Shiny Things◆ ◆ ◆George Lewis: ‘As We May Feel’“Breaking News”; Studio Dan (Hat Hut)Boisterous riffs and counter-riffs seem to suggest improvisatory practices; after all, this veteran artist has explored those practices. Yet George Lewis’s 25-minute joy ride is fully notated. And it was written for an Austrian ensemble which appreciates the chug and wail of Duke Ellington’s train-imitation music, as well as the rigors of extended-technique modernism. SETH COLTER WALLS“As We May Feel”Hat Hut◆ ◆ ◆Meredith Monk: ‘Downfall’“Memory Game”; Meredith Monk & Vocal Ensemble; Bang on a Can All-Stars (Cantaloupe Music)For almost 60 years, the composer and performer Meredith Monk has created works mainly for herself and her close circle, so it’s been an open question what will happen to those intricate, idiosyncratic pieces when she’s gone. This album of sympathetic but not slavish new arrangements — collaborations with the Bang on a Can collective — offers tantalizing experiments. The clarinetist Ken Thomson gives the hawing vocals of “Downfall,” part of Ms. Monk’s post-apocalyptic 1983 evening “The Games,” seductively sinister instrumental surroundings. ZACHARY WOOLFE“Downfall”Cantaloupe Music◆ ◆ ◆Tristan Perich: ‘Drift Multiply,’ Section 6“Drift Multiply” (New Amsterdam/Nonesuch)Music emerges out of snowdrifts of white noise on this mesmerizing track. Tristan Perich is one of the most innovative tinkerers in electronic music, creating works of vibrant mystery. In “Drift Multiply,” 50 violins interact with 50 loudspeakers connected to as many custom-built circuit boards that channel the sound into one-bit audio. The result is a constantly evolving landscape where sounds coalesce and prism, where the violins both pull into focus and blur into a soothing ether. CORINNA da FONSECA-WOLLHEIM“Drift Multiply,” Section 6New Amsterdam◆ ◆ ◆Joseph C. Phillips Jr.: ‘Ferguson: Summer of 2014’“The Grey Land”; Numinous (New Amsterdam)Joseph C. Phillips Jr.’s “The Grey Land” is a stirring, stylistically varied mono-opera that draws on its composer’s reflections on being Black in contemporary America. The longest movement on the premiere recording makes an early textual reference to Barber’s “Knoxville: Summer of 1915” while dramatizing an expectant couple’s unease in the wake of the death of Michael Brown. SETH COLTER WALLS“Ferguson: Summer of 2014”New Amsterdam◆ ◆ ◆Prokofiev: Piano Concerto No. 2, Andantino“Silver Age”; Daniil Trifonov, piano; Mariinsky Orchestra; Valery Gergiev, conductor (Deutsche Grammophon)The thoughtful pianist Daniil Trifonov explores the music of Russia’s so-called “silver age” of the early 20th century on a fascinating album that offers various solo works and concertos by Scriabin, Prokofiev and Stravinsky. The spacious yet fiendishly difficult first movement of Prokofiev’s Second Piano Concerto is especially exciting. ANTHONY TOMMASINIPiano Concerto No. 2, AndantinoDeutsche Grammophon◆ ◆ ◆Rameau: ‘The Arts and the Hours’“Debussy Rameau”; Vikingur Olafsson, piano (Deutsche Grammophon)Few musicians craft their albums with as much care as Vikingur Olafsson, whose “Debussy Rameau” is a brilliantly conceived, nearly 30-track conversation across centuries between two French masters. There is one modern intervention: Mr. Olafsson’s solo arrangement of an interlude from Rameau’s “Les Boréades” — tender and reverential, a wellspring of grace. JOSHUA BARONE“The Arts and the Hours”Deutsche Grammophon◆ ◆ ◆Jean-Féry Rebel: ‘Le Chaos’“Labyrinth”; David Greilsammer, piano (Naïve)In his riveting, aptly titled album “Labyrinth,” the formidable pianist David Greilsammer daringly juxtaposes pieces spanning centuries, from Lully to Ofer Pelz. The theme of the album is captured in Jonathan Keren’s arrangement of Rebel’s “Le Chaos,” which comes across like an early-18th-century venture into mind-spinning modernism. ANTHONY TOMMASINI“Le Chaos”Naïve◆ ◆ ◆Rebecca Saunders: ‘Still’“Musica Viva, Vol. 35”; Carolin Widmann, violin; Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra; Ilan Volkov, conductor (BR-Klassik)A renowned figure on Europe’s experimental music scene, Rebecca Saunders builds teeming systems of shimmying severity from the sparest melodic materials. In this live recording of her violin concerto, Carolin Widmann excels in fulfilling the score’s contrasting requirements of delicacy and power. Helping judge the balance is the conductor Ilan Volkov, an artist American orchestras might consider working with. SETH COLTER WALLS“Still”BR-Klassik◆ ◆ ◆Schubert: ‘Des Fischers Liebesglück’“Where Only Stars Can Hear Us: Schubert Songs”; Karim Sulayman, tenor; Yi-heng Yang, fortepiano (Avie)Intimate, sweet-toned and more easily given to dry humor than its powerful keyboard successors, the fortepiano should be a natural choice for Schubert lieder. Yet recordings such as this exquisitely personal recital — with the clear-voiced tenor Karim Sulayman and the sensitive pianist Yi-heng Yang — are still rare. Listen to them weave a storyteller’s spell in this song about a nighttime tryst in a fishing boat, and marvel at the emotional arc they weave with the simplest of gestures. CORINNA da FONSECA-WOLLHEIM“Des Fischers Liebesglück”Avie◆ ◆ ◆Ethel Smyth: ‘The Prisoner Awakes’“The Prison”; Experiential Orchestra and Chorus; James Blachly, conductor (Chandos)Ethel Smyth, suffragist and composer, is among several female composers receiving fresh, deserved attention as the classical music industry tackles its diversity problem. If they all receive recordings as perfect as this account of her last major work, we will all benefit. Half symphony, half oratorio, “The Prison” includes this striking chorale prelude, with dark and light in the same bars, at its heart. DAVID ALLEN“The Prisoner Awakes”Chandos◆ ◆ ◆Anna Thorvaldsdottir: ‘Mikros’“Epicycle II”; Gyda Valtysdottir (Sono Luminus)A subterranean hall of mirrors lures in the listener in this deeply affecting three-minute track. Gyda Valtysdottir’s cello takes on the guise of a modern-day Orpheus and the spectral sounds of the underworld as she layers her performance on top of two prerecorded tracks. As this protagonist cello line sighs, heaves and slackens, the taped parts add fragmented scratch tones, whispers and tremors, evoking terrain both alluring and treacherous. CORINNA da FONSECA-WOLLHEIM“Mikros”Sono Luminus◆ ◆ ◆Joseph Wölfl: Piano Sonata in E, Allegro“The Beethoven Connection”; Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, piano (Chandos)No finer recording has emerged from the Beethoven celebration than this, and it has not a single work by Beethoven on it. Mr. Bavouzet’s inquisitive look at the musicians who were composing at the same time as their colleague and competitor features Muzio Clementi, Johann Nepomuk Hummel, Jan Ladislav Dussek — but it’s the forgotten Joseph Wölfl, who once battled Beethoven in a duel of keyboard skills, who comes out best, in this immaculate, charming sonata. DAVID ALLENPiano Sonata in E, AllegroChandos◆ ◆ ◆[embedded content]AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Beethoven's Greatness Is in the Details

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best MoviesBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest TheaterBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s NotebookBeethoven’s 250th Birthday: His Greatness Is in the DetailsBrahms, Wagner, even Sondheim: All have followed the great master in building their works from small bits of music.Credit…Eleni KalorkotiDec. 14, 2020, 5:00 a.m. ETThe classical music industry had planned to go all out commemorating Beethoven’s 250th anniversary this year, culminating in his birthday this week. As it happens, the precise date of his birth is uncertain. Records indicate that he was baptized in Bonn, Germany, on Dec. 17, 1770. Since it was customary then to carry out that ritual within 24 hours of a birth, it’s been assumed he was born on Dec. 16 — but we don’t know for sure.Performances were scheduled throughout the year and around the world. The Boston Symphony Orchestra planned to open its season this fall with a cycle of the nine symphonies. The Barbican Center in London was presenting a yearlong festival. Carnegie Hall said it would devote roughly a fifth of its 2019-20 season to his music.But when the pandemic hit, Beethoven’s birthday party was largely canceled, along with the rest of the global performing arts calendar.Have no fear, though: He’s doing just fine. As Carnegie’s promotional materials put it, Beethoven “rouses our spirits, moves us to tears, and inspires our most profound thoughts”; he is “without challenge the face of Western classical music.” Whew. Indeed, I was impressed that the New York Philharmonic chose mostly to ignore the anniversary. Instead, this February the orchestra began Project 19, commemorating the centennial of the 19th Amendment by commissioning works by 19 female composers. Here was an important venture that would honor the heritage that Beethoven epitomizes by bringing it into the present and empowering fresh voices.Beethoven’s dominance of classical programming is a little crazy. Yet he was indisputably amazing. He cultivated the mystique of the composer as colossus, as a seer and hero striding the earth, channeling messages from on high and revealing them to us mere mortals.In person, he may not have advanced this image. Unkempt and ornery, he had delusions about having royal blood, kept falling for women of the upper ranks in Vienna who were unattainable matches, and, in a pathetic attempt at having a family, spent years in court fighting to gain custody of his nephew from the boy’s widowed mother, whom he considered morally unfit. (He succeeded, with predictably fraught results.)Yet perhaps his odd appearance and manner, as well as his valiant struggle with deafness, actually contributed to the spell he cast. And whatever his personality, his music does seem to define grandeur and heroism.What do we hear in the film “The King’s Speech” when George VI of England addresses his subjects at the start of World War II? The slow movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony — music that sounds like a solemn, steadily determined march.Still, there is a long tradition of debunking the heroic trappings of Beethoven’s works. In a 1945 review of George Szell conducting the New York Philharmonic in Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, Virgil Thomson acknowledges the history of hearing the piece as expressing victory, fate, the hope of conquered nations to resist tyranny, and the like. Sure enough, he writes, Szell conducted a “thoroughly demagogic and militarized version of it.” But not to worry: “The piece will recover from its present military service just as easily as it has from its past metaphysical and political associations.”Yes, Beethoven wrote heroic pieces. But those scores are often filled out with audacious flights. And he wrote just as many brazenly humorous, even hilarious works, like the Presto finale of his early Piano Sonata No. 6 in F, which could be the score for a slapstick silent film.Even the finale of the “Eroica” Symphony, for all its Promethean energy, is boisterous and full of musical jokes. Beethoven takes a kind of comic tune and puts it through a series of improbable yet triumphant variations. Yet all these works, whether riotous, near-crazed, strangely mystical or sublime, somehow embody greatness and come across as inevitable, as if the music simply must be the way it is. Why?It’s all in the details. Beethoven was a master — maybe the ultimate master — of the technique of using small motifs (a few notes, a melodic fragment, a rhythmic gesture) to generate an entire movement, even an entire composition. This is something he learned in part from Haydn during the time he spent with the older master in Vienna, as well as from studying and copying out Haydn’s scores, which he continued to do for years.But Beethoven took the technique to a new level of sophistication. Concertgoers may not consciously pick up all the recurrences and manipulations of motifs in a Beethoven piece. Still, those interrelated elements come through subliminally, even for those not trained in music. That’s why a wild romp, like the frenetic, dancing final movement of the Seventh Symphony, also seems a cohesive, coherent entity, a truly great piece.Achieving motivic coherence in his scores was not easy for Beethoven to pull off. Leonard Bernstein made a few attempts to explain this in his televised lectures, including once in a famous 1954 Omnibus program on Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, when he examined how the opening four notes — the so-called “fate” motif — are used like a “springboard for the symphonic continuity to come.”Then, at the piano and with an orchestra, Bernstein performed passages reconstructed from sketches Beethoven had discarded; he wanted to show how ineffective some of these rejects were — until Beethoven got it right. Bernstein dug deeper into Beethoven’s procedures during one of his 1973 Norton Lectures (broadcast in 1976), when he took apart the first movement of the “Pastoral” Symphony. He asked the audience to get rid of all its notions that the piece is about “birds and brooks and rustic pleasures,” and proceeded to reveal how the whole movement is constructed out of materials contained in just the first four measures.Composers after Beethoven were powerfully influenced by this technique, and not just Brahms and Mahler in their symphonies. Wagner adapted Beethoven’s approach in his operas, using “leitmotifs” to organize works that lasted hours. Puccini had his own version of the procedure.Stephen Sondheim, fresh from college, studied the scores of Beethoven quartets, among other works, during private lessons with the 12-tone composer Milton Babbitt. The most important thing he learned from these lessons, Mr. Sondheim told me in an interview many years ago, was the principle of “long-lined composition.”“How do you organize materials to last for three minutes, 15 minutes, 33 minutes?” he said. “This turned out to be very useful when I started writing long songs and scenes, like ‘Someone in a Tree’ [in ‘Pacific Overtures’] and the opening of Act II in ‘Sweeney Todd.’”In “Merrily We Roll Along,” the songs are “interconnected through chunks of melody, rhythm and accompaniment,” Mr. Sondheim wrote in the liner notes for the original cast recording. Surely that’s the way Beethoven would have written a score for a Broadway musical.Even today I’ll often read, for example, a composer’s program note explaining that a new chamber music piece written in a single 15-minute movement and an essentially atonal language is based on a five-note motif. Beethoven would approve.In his late period, Beethoven entered a sphere that seemed almost mystical, and considered himself not just a composer but also a “Tondichter” (“tone poet”). Yet even when exploring new realms of structure and sound, Beethoven generated these late scores from small motifs. Wagner studied the seven-movement Op. 131 String Quartet obsessively, seeing in it a model for ways to structure a music drama.It is telling that the last concert I heard before the pandemic closed theaters worldwide was at Carnegie Hall on March 8, when the violinist Leonidas Kavakos, the cellist Yo-Yo Ma and the pianist Emanuel Ax played, yes, Beethoven, ending with the majestic and awesome, searching and impetuous “Archduke” Trio. Even if Beethoven’s big birthday has not been what we expected, that superb performance of his trio, just before everything stopped, has kept coming back to me, a lasting party.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Beethoven’s 250th Birthday: Here’s Everything You Need to Know

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best MoviesBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest TheaterBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyBeethoven’s 250th Birthday: Here’s Everything You Need to KnowExplore the music, life and times of the composer who changed culture.Credit…Gabriel AlcalaDec. 14, 2020, 5:00 a.m. ETNo composer left a mark on music quite like Ludwig van Beethoven. He took the popular forms of his time — symphony, string quartet, piano sonata, opera — and stretched them to their breaking points. He embodied the then-new ideal of the musician as passionate, politically engaged Romantic hero.In honor of the 250th anniversary of his birth — he was baptized Dec. 17, 1770, and probably born a day or two earlier — writers and critics for The New York Times have spent the year choosing their favorite recordings; delving into his life and times; traveling from the house where he was born in Bonn, Germany, to his grave in Vienna, Austria; speaking with some of his best interpreters; and exploring his vast, influential body of work. It is, if not everything you need to know about Beethoven, then a pretty good start.Listen to the Best of His MusicWe asked some of our favorite artists which five minutes of his music they would play to make their friends fall in love with Beethoven. We created our dream cycle of his nine symphonies, picking a favorite recording of each. And our chief classical critic describes how his works are built from tiny bits of material.Following in His Footsteps“The time seemed ripe for a pilgrimage in search of Beethoven, the man,” our reporter wrote early this year. We also published profiles of people who surrounded him, prodded and inspired him.A Bold Way to Perform His Symphonies“He was not somebody who was content to write elegant music for easy listening,” said the conductor John Eliot Gardiner, who uses rough, fresh instruments like those played in Beethoven’s time. Our critic wrote that this was “exactly what we needed in this year of Beethoven saturation.”Confronting His Piano SonatasOur chief critic, who took on the daunting Op. 110 Sonata in college, explores the “extraordinary achievement” of Igor Levit’s new recording of the full set, while cherishing Artur Schnabel’s classic cycle. And the pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard talks about why he thinks of Beethoven as avant-garde — still.A Nine-Hour Marathon: His QuartetsWhat is it like listening to all 17 of his works for string quartet? It gave one writer “an acute awareness of the extraordinary range of sensations Beethoven depicts. Joy. Rage. Slyness. Gravitas. Grief. Snickering. Despair. Holiness.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More